Piet Mondrian

I have done many different Piet Mondrian inspired art activities.  But this one is now my absolute favorite and so easy to do!

These were all done by Kindergarten and Grade One students.  

The children dipped precut pieces of thick cardboard into a dish of black paint and used the cardboard to print lines on their white paper.  They were encouraged to make vertical and horizontal lines that would form rectangular shapes on their papers.  Watch out for those kids who are so fascinated by the printmaking that they don't know when to stop! :) 

When the paint had dried they were to look for enclosed shapes and colour them in using oil pastels in the primary colours.  

Some were so interesting even without the pastel.  I wish I had taken a few photos of those.  Either way I think they are frame-worthy!

Mondrian Hearts

This art activity was inspired by Mrs. T's First Grade Class. 

  Our version was done a bit differently.  We drew lines on heart templates with pencils and rulers and then painted in our shapes.  When the paint was dry we cut out our hearts and glued them onto black construction paper.  We then glued down black strips of paper to cover our pencil lines and then cut our the hearts again leaving a black border.

This bulletin board display might be my favorite of all time.  Here is what my board looked like before the art work was put up:

Primary Colours and Piet Mondrian

I have 2 Mondrain activities to share with you.  I love to use the works of Piet Mondrian to introduce primary colours to my students.

 I did the following Mondrian inspired art with my class last year.  Students used pencils and rulers to draw 5 vertical lines and 4 horizontal lines.  I then asked them to erase a few of the smaller lines created when lines crossed each other.  Using a black pastel the students traced over their lines.  We then used red, blue and yellow tempera block paints to colour in a few of the shapes... They probably coloured in too many but kids love colour and it was hard to keep them from painting in the whole page!

                                                 

This second version I tried this year.  We integrated computers with art. 

Kids used the program KidPix to create their grid lines.  They had to use the pencil tool to draw straight vertical and horizontal lines from one edge to the other.  Then using the eraser they had to erase a few of the small lines.  Any erasing that took away too much black was later corrected with a black marker.

We then used broad tip markers to colour in the rectangular shapes.  It was a great opportunity to teach them proper colouring techniques using markers. 

I love how bold the lines turned out using the computer program.  Ideally we would have used the paint bucket feature to fill in the colour but our school's computer lab printer only prints in black and white.